Bruce Lee’s Daughter, Shannon Lee, Wants Quentin Tarantino To Keep Her Father’s Name Out Of His Mouth Already

July 3, 2021 / Posted by:

Quentin Tarantino has been promoting the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novel, which is a re-telling of the entire movie and gives the backstory of Cliff Booth (played by Brad Pitt in the movie). Bruce Lee makes another not-so-flattering appearance in it. So QT has been asked about the criticism he was hit with over his continued portrayal of Bruce Lee as an egotistical bag of arrogance and he doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down. That led to Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, writing an open letter to QT for The Hollywood Reporter where she let him know that her father’s name is not a woman’s foot, so please keep it out of his damn mouth.

When OUATIH came out in 2019, QT got shat on for painting Bruce Lee as a haughty asshole who in his prime, could get his ass whooped by an aging stuntman (Cliff Booth). At the time, Shannon Lee said that she understood that QT wanted to make Cliff Booth look like a supreme badass, but didn’t appreciate QT making her dad look like a joke. QT responded to that, saying that Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy. Shannon Lee responded to that by saying that QT needs to slather a huge layer of STFU on his talking hole and stop going on about her father. Well, if QT granted Shannon Lee’s wish, we’d all be fighting an army of roaches over the last non-decomposing McDonald’s Big Mac on a pile of rubble, because that would’ve brought on the apocalypse. Instead, QT turned it up.

It seems like QT’s nipple knobs get hard over pissing off Bruce Lee’s family and fans. Because Screen Rant says that Bruce Lee is even more full of himself in the OUATIH novel:

While Tarantino originally defended the movie’s depiction of Bruce Lee as a creative choice, the novel’s retelling of the controversial Bruce-Cliff fight scene is actually worse. In the novel’s chapter, Bruce is even more arrogant and with a cocky disdain for stuntmen, while Cliff goes into how much he hates Bruce and repeatedly calls him “Twinkle Toes.”

QT was on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast to promote the OUATIH book and said that he gets why Shannon Lee has a problem with his depiction of her father, but everyone else can suck a dick (and yes, he says that like it’s a bad thing). QT went on to say that Bruce Lee did not respect “American stuntmen.” via IndieWire:

“Where I am coming from is I can understand his daughter having a problem with it. It’s her fucking father. I get that,” Tarantino said. “But anybody else, oh suck a dick!”

Tarantino and Rogan’s discussion touched upon Bruce Lee’s relationship with real-life Hollywood stuntman Gene Labelle. “The stuntmen hated Bruce on ‘Green Hornet,’” the director said. “It’s in Matthew Polly’s book [‘Bruce Lee: A Life’] and it’s always been known. That’s why Gene Labelle was brought in, to teach Bruce respect for American stuntmen.”

“Bruce had no respect for American stuntmen, he was always hitting them with his feet,” Tarantino continued. “It’s called tagging when you hit a stuntman for real. He was always tagging them with his feet and his fist and it got to the point where they would refuse to work with Bruce. He had nothing but disrespect for American stuntmen. It was probably just like, ‘Oh they’re just not good enough. They are pussies. I want to make it look real!’ But stuntmen don’t like that. That’s unprofessional.”

You would think that a noted Bruce Lee scholar like Quentin Tarantino would’ve taken a quick trip to Bruce Lee’s Wikipedia and learned that he was born in San Francisco, but I guess not.

Shannon Lee got a whiff of QT’s latest comments on Bruce Lee and defended her dad in an op-ed piece for The Hollywood Reporter titled: Does Quentin Tarantino Hate Bruce Lee? Or Does It Just Help Sell Books?

Shannon starts by saying that QT has some kind of love-hate obsession with her father and mentions that the Bride in Kill Bill wears a knock-off of her dad’s yellow jumpsuit. Shannon then writes that she wishes QT would “take the name Bruce Lee off his lips now” and she’s tired of white men in Hollywood, like QT, who mansplain her own father to her and don’t try to understand how things were for a Chinese man with an accent working in Hollywood in the 1960s.

I’m tired of hearing from white men in Hollywood that he was arrogant and an asshole when they have no idea and cannot fathom what it might have taken to get work in 1960s and ’70s Hollywood as a Chinese man with (God forbid) an accent, or to try to express an opinion on a set as a perceived foreigner and person of color. I’m tired of white men in Hollywood mistaking his confidence, passion and skill for hubris and therefore finding it necessary to marginalize him and his contributions. I’m tired of white men in Hollywood finding it too challenging to believe that Bruce Lee might have really been good at what he did and maybe even knew how to do it better than them.

Shannon is also tired of the accusations that Bruce Lee wasn’t that into martial arts when he lived and breathed martial arts. Some have said that Shannon doesn’t know what she’s talking about since her father died when she was 4, and she responded to that by writing that she’s spoken to everybody who knew him best.

Shannon adds that she’s not talking about ALL white men in Hollywood, of course, because she’s had great working relationships with some. But others only use Bruce Lee’s image “when and how it suits them without acknowledging his humanity, his legacy, or his family.” Shannon is not saying that everybody needs to burp up hearts and rainbows about her father but that someone’s negative opinion of him might “be colored by personal or cultural bias.

She ends by asking QT to retire Bruce Lee’s name from his tongue:

Mr. Tarantino, you don’t have to like Bruce Lee. I really don’t care if you like him or not. You made your movie and now, clearly, you’re promoting a book. But in the interest of respecting other cultures and experiences you may not understand, I would encourage you to take a pass on commenting further about Bruce Lee and reconsider the impact of your words in a world that doesn’t need more conflict and fewer cultural heroes.

So does this mean that QT is going to listen to Shannon Lee and stop publicly stroking his hate boner for Bruce Lee? Yes, I’m sure the name Bruce Lee will never leave QT’s mouth in public again, and by that I mean he’ll say Bruce Lee’s name approximately five thousand times during a press conference where he’ll announce that his final movie will be a ten-part Bruce Lee biopic.

Pic: Warner Bros. via Wenn.com

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